About Me

I am a married fifty-something Catholic. I volunteer in youth ministry. I live in Hampton Roads. I am a member of a Catholic parish in the Diocese of Richmond. I work in accelerator operations for the U.S. Department of Energy. I am also a sometimes professional writer, mostly of materials for Role Playing Games, especially of the science fiction RPG Traveller.

Wednesday, December 6, 2006

Running through the blogosphere

One of the amazing thing about the Internet and the phenom of blogs is that some Church in the Diocese of Orange has a priest say Mass dressed as Barney and all of a sudden every Catholic blog from Rome to Portland is talking about it. Suddenly the Bishop is getting letters from all over the U.S. The Vatican has to have heard of what is going on, and it's hard to believe that Bishop Brown hasn't heard from someone in Rome with at least a little comment on the incident. Of course the parish did it to itself by first posting the video on-line at their web site.This brings up the real point. The agendas of Groups, organizations, and parishes who seem determined to go outside the belief structure of the Church become very easy to discover. It has become much harder for a local ordinary to turn a blind eye to such practices, as his fellow bishops and Rome become appraised of what is happening not through private letters to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith but through dozens of blogs where hundreds of comments advertise and denounce the abuses.While the Church has shown amazing resiliency is ignoring the mainstream media it is a little harder to ignore educated laymen and even clergy quoting chapter and verse of Church documents while denouncing practices which are illicit. Let us hope and pray that the hierarchy will start to effectively use this information to respond to curb these abuses.